Email Marketing Best Practices

Marketers also need to ensure that their emails are optimized for different email clients. Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, emphasizes that code needs to be tested for different combinations of devices and email clients—for example, a person on an iPhone using Apple Mail, or a person on an Android phone using Gmail. “All those different permutations need to be tested and taken into consideration so that the emails look great regardless of what kind of mobile device the user has,” Evans says.

Foster agrees, adding that there’s a tendency to design emails for the lowest-common-denominator mail client. For example, a developer might code emails so that they work well on Outlook for PC—and then simply repackage that same Outlook for PC experience for all mail clients. According to Foster, this practice of “designing down” presents a tremendous missed opportunity with the rise of mobile devices. He cites the popularity of Apple Mail on the iPhone—which he says accounts for 40 to 50 percent of email opens for some marketers—as representing a chance for marketers to make a splash by including interactive capabilities such as video, animation, and slideshows. Designing emails specifically for mail clients enables marketers to be more creative in their approach, which also has the effect of giving customers a better experience.

The travel industry is an example of a market that has used mobile devices to effectively engage with customers. Because their customers are on the go, travel companies must use mobile devices to reach their audience and deliver timely updates. “A lot of travel companies do mobile really well,” Garrison says. “Most of the time, if I’m engaging with what they’re doing, I’m on the go—I feel like travel companies and travel organizations have done a good job with that.”

Garrison also cites clothing retailer J.Crew as a company that practices effective email marketing, particularly on mobile devices. “They have spent a ton of time working on the personalization of their emails on mobile, and they’ve also spent a good amount of time on tying the email experience to the web experience,” she says. She adds that connecting the email and web experience is crucial—when customers click through to the website, they should be having a “personalized and optimized” experience.

ESSENTIALS FOR ALL EMAILS

While mobile devices should be a priority, a number of best practices can be applied to all emails, regardless of device. Perhaps above all, marketers need to be explicit about what value they are offering customers. “The person needs to know what the value is right away,” Sibley says. Customers should see what the email is delivering from the subject line and first two lines of text, regardless of whether the email is on a mobile or desktop device. “You need to have a compelling subject line no matter where you are, on desktop or mobile, and there needs to be some kind of obvious next step for the person to take after they’ve read the email,” she says.

Clarity as to the action expected of users is critical; indeed, to Foster, having a clear call to action inside an email is “the most important piece.” He says that marketers should keep in mind that customers are constantly inundated with emails. For this reason, marketers need to take care that they are focusing on getting users to take a single action, and that they aren’t communicating too many things—especially on mobile screens. To do so effectively, they should examine their overall email marketing strategy and pay attention to the design of their emails, ensuring that they can be consumed easily.

Personalization is also essential, yet many marketers are still not applying it to emails. “Even though we continually remind marketers on the benefits of personalization and relevancy, we’re not seeing 100 percent adoption of that yet,” Evans says. “We would encourage marketers to use personalization as a way to connect to their customers in a very powerful way.” Sibley agrees. “The thing that we always incorporate, no matter what, into our emails, whether it’s mobile or desktop, is personalization—using the person’s first name, making it really seem like it’s coming from someone personal within our company,” she says.

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